What the Water Gave Me
by Kanthia
Summary: This is not a love story. It starts, as most comedies do, with her and her twin brother hanging out outside the city limits. 17/18 origin story; oneshot.


In a recent interview, Toriyama revealed Android 17 and 18's original human names, and somehow that ended with me writing this.

Warning for body horror! 

* * *

**what the water gave me**

**01**

This is not a love story.

It starts, as most comedies do, with her and her twin brother hanging out outside the city limits. Her brother had stolen a pack of cigarettes and they were searching out their favourite hiding spot in the woods to smoke and de-stress. They are thirteen. Two lines streak across the sky — tiny round space-ships, she's certain — and bury themselves into the city. Lapis wants to watch what happens next. Lapis is two minutes younger and hot-headed to Lazuli's cool rationality, but she follows him as he climbs up their tree.

They're on a hill, two miles out of town. Lapis likes the spot because they can climb the tallest tree on the hill and get a fabulous view of East City sprawling below them as they smoke and make fun of the kids at school, one by one. They're up in the tree, lighting up when there's a flash, a rumble, and East City explodes in a ball of flame. 

**02**

This is not a love story.

When the smoke clears they make their way back to East City, and as they make their way towards the radius of the blast it's all increasing noise and confusion, death and fire. Lazuli wants to stake out shelter in the rubble, maybe see if they can find something that belongs to them, but it's pretty clear that their life is now flat grey rock, vaporized beyond recognition. Lapis suggests instead that they loot what they can and make their way north, hitchhiking and farm-hopping up to North City where they have some cousins they could hole up with.

It'll be fun, he says. Maybe they can steal a car. He's always wanted to try driving.

Lazuli's not sure, but she's also looking at the wreckage of everything she's ever known. As people rush around them, they saunter into a convenience store and fill rucksacks with food and bottled water. While Lapis grabs at candy bars, Lazuli finds tablecloths she supposes could work for blankets.

They hike it out to the highway, and Lapis jabs a thumb out, and then — and only then — does Lazuli allow herself to look behind her, at what they're leaving behind. 

**03**

This is not a love story.

A truck driver hauling farm equipment picks them up, lets them share the shotgun seat in return for the rest of their carton of cigarettes. He has the radio going, and that's how Lapis and Lazuli learn that the thing that destroyed East City was two people, and those two people are having a fistfight with some other people in the wasteland southwest of West City.

(Serves them all right, Lapis says, resting his head on Lazuli's shoulder. Letting themselves get blown up by two people itching for a fight.)

Once Lapis is asleep the driver starts running his free hand in Lazuli's hair, saying that she lucked out, he has a weakness for blondes. Lazuli says no thanks, that they have food and water if he wants more payment. The driver's not buying. Lazuli shakes her brother awake and drives a heel into the driver's crotch.

They find a farm just before dark, eat chocolate in beds dug into hay bales. The earth shakes a little as they try to get themselves to sleep, Lapis complaining about static and the hair on Lazuli's neck standing on end, and that's how they survived the Saiyan invasion. 

**04**

This is not a love story.

Lazuli landed hard on her left ankle jumping out of the tree, way back when they watched East City burn. She hadn't thought much of it at the time, but after three days walking the road it starts to ache and she can't help but limp. She'd do anything to keep Lapis from finding out, but, well, twins have a sixth sense about one another.

Three days is also how long it takes for their food and water to run out, and they start stealing, but it's never enough. Lapis gets angry, starts talking about jacking a car again. He'd always had that rebellious streak in him, the you-and-me-against-the-world.

On the fifth day Lazuli wakes with an ache in her head and swelling in her ankle so bad she can't put any weight on it. Lapis has had enough, swears he'll jack the next truck that goes by. He jabs out his thumb.

An unmarked van stops for them; to their luck, there's an old man at the wheel. He observes them closely as Lapis explains their plight, then says he's heading up to the Northern Mountains and would be fine dropping them off in North City. There's pity in his voice, but also something darker that gives Lazuli the creeps, something like revenge.

Lapis calls shotgun and tells Lazuli to climb into the back row of seats. There's a mess of electronics in the trunk. The old man steps on the gas, then looks to Lapis and murmurs _yes, you'll do wonderfully_. With a movement too quick for his age he leans over and jabs Lapis in the arm with a hypodermic needle. Lapis slumps in his seat; something like rage courses through Lazuli, but before she can get her hands around the old man's neck there's a sharp pain and everything goes white. 

**05**

This is certainly not a love story.

Lazuli finds consciousness, uneasily. Everything's blue-green. She's floating. She's in a tank, in some kind of blue-green liquid, floating. She's in pain, a lot of pain, everywhere.

_Where's Lapis_, she thinks. _Oh my God, where's Lapis_. She tries to turn her head, sending a wave of nausea down from her head to the base of her spine. There's a ventilator in her mouth, she can feel the tube down her throat, and her lips are sewn shut around it. She can't close her eyes. She can't blink. She has no eyelids. She looks down, sees a mess of muscle and bone and metal and no skin, no skin at all. Her stomach churns. She watches it churn.

_Where's Lapis_, she thinks. She's in a tank, and the tank says **81**. Someone or something moves, vaguely, beyond the glass wall. She wants to scream. 

**06**

initializing…  
initializing…  
initializing…  
runtime system error  
this is not a love story 

**07**

While she's awake, she worries about her brother as she takes stock of the changes. She wonders if he's hurting as her muscles and bones are replaced or augmented, cables and fibres alongside flesh, then knit back into facsimiles of arms and legs. She finds consciousness one day and she worries that he's lonely, and her lungs and stomach are gone, metal contraptions in their place.

She learns that she's not supposed to be awake, because if she thinks too much about moving there's a pain in her side and then she's out again. She doesn't mind being out. She dreams, sometimes: she and her brother going to school, running, flying, killing a guy named Goku. She dreams up a hundred million ways to kill a man. Sometimes instead of dreams she has nightmares, of errors in code or of the old man whispering instructions to a horde of pointed tools as they pick her apart, piece by piece. 

**08**

This is not a love story.

In time when she's dragged awake there's no longer a ventilator in her mouth, and the fluid has been drained. The tank opens with a cold hydraulic hiss. That's when she's finally lucid enough to realize that the tank isn't _81_, but _18_.

"Easy," someone mumbles, somewhere, and the sound rings deafening in her ears. She blinks — yes, she has eyelids now — twice, three times. She steps out slowly, shakes her head, flexes her fingers. There's skin on all of her.

"My greatest creations." There's reverence in his voice, and arrogance. Her eyes come fully online, and the room comes into view, far too well. It's a small laboratory, crammed with devices and tools. She can see precisely eighty-three times more clearly than she could before, of that she's certain. The old man is standing next to her, and she can see each of his wrinkles, sense each of his movements before he makes them. He's Doctor Gero, of the Red Ribbon Army. He's fifty-two and has an IQ of 186. A hundred thousand facts spring to mind at once.

"Where's my brother?" She can feel her voice vibrating in her throat, grave from lack of use. Four years have passed. "What did you do with my brother?"

The doctor extends a hand. She has no idea what to do with it. "Oh, he's there, next to you. Now, let's run some diagnostics, shall we?" She spins around; her brother is there, flexing his fingers and cracking his knuckles, and she feels relief like a punch to the stomach, because her brother's alive and safe, and she has absolutely no idea what his name is. 

**09**

This is not a love story.

She goes for the doctor's throat, and he whips out a remote control with a red button on it, and then she's floating in a dream again, her and her brother against the world, as usual.

When she comes to again the doctor looks harried, and he's an android, and someone's banging on the laboratory door. Seventeen makes a motion with his chin that suggests he has a plan — his eyes locked on the shut-off remote.

There's another tank, labelled **16**, that she doesn't have any record of in her banks. It's new. When she moves towards it the doctor freaks out, which she takes as a good sign, and then there's noise and confusion and ignored orders and Seventeen kicks the doctor's head off, which is hilarious, and they'll never be asleep again. 

**10**

This is now a love story.

Sixteen is tall and well-built and gentle, and the spitting image of Gero's dead son. When she touches on that bit of knowledge, she almost feels sorry for the old man — almost. Folks do weird things when people hurt their family.

As she breaks Vegeta's arms, she wonders, idly, if Gero had planned on tapping into that rage in she and Seventeen, or if he had noticed how the two of them had always been able to pick up on other people's energy, or if they'd just been unlucky enough to run into him as he scoured the countryside for bodies. In any case, she doesn't mind. She and her brother are alive, and that's all that matters.

Krillin is kind of adorable, in a stalwart, earnest, cowardly way. She mentions as much to Seventeen after they finally steal a van — the irony is not lost, on her — and he thinks she's crazy. It's okay. 

**11**

They get three days, three wonderful, glorious days together, and then a thing called Cell interrupts an otherwise boring battle between Seventeen and someone slightly more than Piccolo.

Seems that Gero had never intended for them to live at all.

(She dreams, inside Cell, of growing old.) 

**12**

See, the problem is that love stories have happy endings.

She had always figured that it would be her and Seventeen, Seventeen and her, smoking cigarettes in treetops just outside of East City. Now four years are gone and their target is dead and a giant dragon has taken away the bomb in her chest, leaving an unbearable lightness where her heart used to be.

She searches for a year, not even knowing how to ask for him by name, combs lists of convicted car thieves and interviews convenience store clerks. Finally, she hears word of a nature reserve outside of North City that's recently hired a young man with black hair.

He has a shitty little cabin in the woods, with a shitty little bed and a shitty little gun that he uses to chase off poachers. _See, Eighteen_, he says, placid, plastic. _I have everything I need here_.

_Right_, she says. Seventeen never needed anyone. She lifts off, somewhere, anywhere. 

**13**

It ends, as most comedies do, with a marriage.

Eighteen has nowhere to go, so she ends up at a little house on a little island in the middle of nowhere, and Krillin takes her in. She has no direction or purpose or reason for being, just a little device in her that turns sunlight into energy and no life, no life at all. He comforts her in her loneliness. She cries for East City, and the pathos in a sad old man seeking revenge, and for her childhood and for Sixteen and her brother, old before his time.

Years later she's shopping in North City with Krillin and Marron, and they run into Seventeen with his wife and children. He nods. She nods. Krillin's nervous. Seventeen's wife is pretty and tall and blonde. He seems happy. 

**14**

_"__It's just you and me against the world, Lazuli. Nothing's ever going to change that."_

_"__Whatever you say, Lapis."_

_(This is not a love story.)_


End file.
